Don't laugh, and please don't tell me to get a 939 or 754 board! I need a new socket A board. This board has to be the mack-daddy of Socket A boards, as it is going to reside in my computer for at least a year or two. Here's what I'm looking at right now:

I could go KT880, but not Asus. I've got an Asus board now and I'll never buy another one. It's a flaky board, and Asus is overrated in my opinion. I used to swear by Abit before caps starting busting all over the place. MSI doesn't impress me, and I'm wary of bios support for the "off" brands like Chaintech, DFI, Albatron, and Soltek.

Actually, I found ASUS Socket A boards to be great quality. But.. they are sure as hell picky with the RAM, although it seems most nForce boards seem to be to some extent. I've been running their A7N8X Deluxe v2 a good 2-3 years. Bitching as hell at first with the Twinmos/Winbond memory (not BH5 chips though, CH5 I think) I bought with it, but bought a couple of Kingmax later on and the problems went away completely.

If you want a real solid setup, go with an ASRock. I found them to be the Kalashnikov of motherboards, but not the best performers . You'll probably get better performance with either a nForce2 or KT880 board though. Not tried any KT880 personally, but if they're less picky than the nForce2, I'd look for those first.

Still running a 8RDA+..great boards...but i think the NF7S v2 is a better one..everything under the sun for your lil hands to tweak with. You said you wanted the best nf2 board..thats it..that epox one (2nd) is a nice one too.

Just an old sheepdog waiting for some nasty wolves to show...ive got more than enough teeth left.

FubbHead wrote:Actually, I found ASUS Socket A boards to be great quality. But.. they are sure as hell picky with the RAM, although it seems most nForce boards seem to be to some extent. I've been running their A7N8X Deluxe v2 a good 2-3 years. Bitching as hell at first with the Twinmos/Winbond memory (not BH5 chips though, CH5 I think) I bought with it, but bought a couple of Kingmax later on and the problems went away completely.

If you want a real solid setup, go with an ASRock. I found them to be the Kalashnikov of motherboards, but not the best performers . You'll probably get better performance with either a nForce2 or KT880 board though. Not tried any KT880 personally, but if they're less picky than the nForce2, I'd look for those first.

Hmm, maybe I got a flaky one then. Mine's a A7N8X Standard (no official 400fsb support) and it acts weird when I try to flash the bios, and sometimes I'll boot up and the bios just goes blank and I lose all my settings.

I'll steer clear of Asrock, though I don't doubt they're functional, they're not what I'm looking for in this case.

LicketySplit wrote:Still running a 8RDA+..great boards...but i think the NF7S v2 is a better one..everything under the sun for your lil hands to tweak with. You said you wanted the best nf2 board..thats it..that epox one (2nd) is a nice one too.

I was thinking about the NF7S v2....but shied away because of cap worries. I guess the problems have been worked out though. Hmmm.

Best damn board I have ever owned period. I have had both the nf7-s and the a7n8xe (still have the asus) and you couldn’t even pay me to give up my infinity. It is the little brother to the lanparty B, same layout and everything. I had better oc’s every time with the infinity, but I imagine an abit would be better with the volt mod crowd. Which I doubt you are into.

Never had a single problem with it, other than the fact it is red.

“but DFI doesn't really have any really nice Socket A boards IIRC.”

Review sites would disagree. At the height of socket A (when these dfi boards came out) there wasn’t a single review site that didn’t crown the ultra b the king of socket A after they reviewed it. In fact it was rare not to find a Ultra B review in the shortbread for a while there.

That's tough, but I really love my Asus A7N8X deluxe rev 1.4
it has the official soundstorm spec with DD encoding (convenient for home theater setups or high end speakers with digital decoding.
I wouldn't listen to music through dolby digital, but it's still very nice for accelerated sound on a dead platform.

I once got a DFI Ultra Infinity because I heard it was the best OCin socket A board bar none. I was utterly dissapointed. I couldn't OC past 204 fsb, so I took the mem and cpu out of the Ultra Infinity, stuck them in my A7N8X, and went straight to 215. I would've called it a dud, but I gave the board to my mom, and went and got another, and exact same story. Now, I could've been doing something wrong because the whole experience seemed too bad to be true, but if I threw in another board I get wiz bang overclocks on the first try. Anyway, I decided not to touch DFI any more, although I've yet to here a bad thing about their 939 boards (not that I've looked). Honestly, the A7N8X 2.0 was my favorite socket A. It's still running after 2-1/2 years. I sold it to a fella, and go figure that's when the IDE controller takes a shat. So I put an IDE card in there and all is well. It has the four mounting holes if your savy to that. Sorry for rambling.

I have it as well and won't buy Asus again. I'm on the 3rd board, as the first 2 died within the first year (one was the memory controller busted, and I forget what the 2nd was from). But, as always, YMMV

You couldn’t get another 11mhz fsb out of the board so it was a "dud" and you won't touch DFI again, wtf.

I got better oc's with my dfi than a nf7s and a7n8xe deluxe (and consequently the ultra B I bought for a friend beat the abit and asus too).

Which means squat. It doesn’t mean abit and asus suck. I just had other problems with them not related to OC.

Convert man, don't take is personal, I just didn't have a good experience with two boards in a row, all other hardware used was constant across all boards used. Like I said, I could have been doing something consistantly wrong, but I don't think so. The board didn't leave me with a good impression. And btw, that board's southbridge got hotter than any other I've seen - many nforce2 boards don't even have a heatsink on the southbridge, the DFI does, and it gets WAY hotter than those without - now that's worth asking WTF. YMMV, but the DFI was the worst overclocker of any nforce2 I've ever used, which has only been about 8 or 10 different boards.

No reason to take it personal, it has been shown on numerous occasions that dfi boards are one of the best ocing boards out there outside of vmods. It just seemed really silly to call it the worst nf2 ocing board and to never consider a dfi board again over 11mhz.

Every single nf2 400ultra has a heatsink on newegg. Mine is warm to the touch, the same temp as the one on the a7n8xe which coincidentally they are basically the same heatsink. I have had my hands on a large number of nf2 boards and they all run about the same, except for some of the low profile (read: the same heatsinks that were on motherboards 4 years ago) which can run a little hot.

Tachyonic Karma: Future decisions traveling backwards in time to smite you now.

I hope you're talking about the southbridge heatsink, cause that's what I'm talking about. The A7N8X dlx 2.0 didn't have a SB heatsink. I'm not positive, but I don't think the NF7-S has a SB heatsink, nor the Shuttle AN35N, nore the Biostar I've got downstairs - I'll check the model and get back to you.

And the reason I decided against getting another DFI was because the good DFI boards back then - the Infinity and the Lan Party, were overclocking boards. Why would I buy an overclocking board, with the intention of overclocking, that I'd had bad experience with - twice in a row -. Now if I only got that same crappy overclock on some PC Chips board then I'd have said, "well, you get what you pay for."

Anyway Vrock, get a DFI if you want, I'm sure they're fine despite my experience. Tons of people love the DFI boards, I read up on them in a couple forums and it seemed like there were as many stories of frustration as there were stories of elation. Their A64 boards seem to have the QC issues ironed out. And, for what its worth, the Lan Party boards, as I recall, didn't seem to have as many issues as the Infinity boards. Then again, the NF7-S is hard to beat for overclocking and stability, but the A7N8X has a better layout (IMO), passive chipset cooling, adequate overclocking, heatsink mounting holes that would accept an ALCU 7000 without Dremeling, and either more usb or more firewire - I can't remember which. In the end, there are probably about 5 contendors for best Socket A board, and which one wins is going to depend a lot on your tastes.

Ghede wrote:I have to to say that I have bought two Abit NF7S v2's and they are still happilly running with no issues so far. Excellent overclockers too.

Yep, nf7-m (didn't need the soundstorm, and Didn't have a graphics card at the time) and this board overclocks quite nicely. Hasn't given me trouble and I've had some bad practices in the past regarding volts etc. Nice overclocker.

SoftIII in the bios makes tweaking a dream. Still running it in my primary rig with a mobile 2500 @ 2.3ghz and 1.6v volts. Does everything I ask it.